I know I’m not the only old-time musician
to say that John Herrmann is one of my favorite people
to play a tune with—a lot of bluegrass, Irish,
Cajun, and other musicians would say the same. John
is best known as a banjo player, but he is also an
expert guitarist, bassist, and fiddler, and has skills
on other instruments as well. John seems to be everywhere,
playing with everyone, not just in the U.S. but in
places as distant as France and Japan. He has played
with such notable bands as the Henrie Brothers, Ralph
Blizard and the New Southern Ramblers, One-Eyed Dog,
the Wandering Ramblers, and Songs from the Mountains;
he and his partner Meredith McIntosh have been part
of the Midnight Mockingbirds, Ida Red, and the Rockinghams—to
name just a few. This article marks his 60th year;
knowing about his Zen practice, I thought it would
be interesting to hear how he relates it to his music.
I interviewed him at Merlefest 2004, and I’m
grateful to Dirk Powell and Ken Perlman for their permission
to include material from interviews they conducted
with John as well. Look for their interviews with him
in an upcoming issue of Banjo
Newsletter.-BL

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No one can deny the near-religious fervor that animates
many fans of old-time music. In a lighthearted manner
it even colors our language: We refer to the moment the
music first electrified us as an “epiphany”or
a “conversion”; we make “pilgrimages” to
Southern fiddlers conventions like Clifftop, Mount Airy,
and Galax; regard with reverence “gurus” or “masters” like
Tommy Jarrell and Melvin Wine; and refer to the “mantric” effects
of repeating a tune 30 or 40 times in a jam session.
Among the bands registered for the Galax Old Fiddlers
Convention in the early 1980s, we find Swami Tommy and
the Round Peak Zen Boys, based in the fictional town
of Nirvana, North Carolina. (I inquired on the Internet
and traced that band name to a friend from long ago,
Rena Rubin. She commented, “When I used to visit
Tommy Jarrell back in those days, I felt like I was truly
sitting at the holy lotus feet of my fiddle guru.”-BL)

Yet after the chuckling dies down, many are left with
the feeling that there is more to the experience of playing
old-time music than the pleasure of a social activity,
that it transcends simple self expression, that it partakes
of something—dare we say spiritual? That word carries
a lot of baggage in our society. John Herrmann avoids
it since it can convey unpleasant overtones of piety,
and it commonly assumes distinctions between spirit,
body, and mind that he doesn’t make. As he puts
it, “the music comes from all that we are. But
he will go so far as to say that when he’s playing
well, the music comes from a place that is “beyond
thought.”